Ferenc Máté points out a detail in one of the pictures of the 13th-century friary he and his wife own in Tuscany, where they also planted a vineyard—and the waitstaff at I Trulli stand poised to serve samplings of four of the wines made from those grapes, at a special lunch hosted by W.W. Norton earlier this week in anticipation of Máté’s new memoir, A Wineyard in Tuscany, which should be coming out any day now. I was lucky enough to sit next to Norton’s publisher, Starling Lawrence, and he told me about visiting the “terrifyingly neat” Máté home. “It always looks like the House & Garden photo crew has either just left or will show up in ten minutes,” he quipped, as we tucked into an appetizer-sized portion of rabbit sausage.
Later, I had the cavatelli with broccoli rabe for the main course, and I found myself looking a bit longingly at Lawrence’s pistachio-crusted rack of lamb. But it all worked out, because the very next afternoon I was invited to a luncheon at Pera introducing some of us media types to Alan Drew, whose debut novel, Gardens of Water, Random House will be publishing next year, and they had the most amazing baby lamb chops there. But before that, Drew told us about how he and his wife had arrived in Turkey to start working as volunteer teachers just days before the devastating earthquake that struck Marmara in 1999, setting his life in that country on a radical new trajectory. (While the experience was still fresh in his mind, he wrote about the days immediately following the quake in an article for In Motion.) After three years, he came back, got an MFA from Iowa, and now he’s teaching high school in Cincinnati—but I’ve got a hunch his life will become a lot less quiet come February.